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There is nothing inherit bitcoin to force banks to keep a reserve, but neither is there with physical cash. There's no reason a government couldn't impose the same restrictions on a bitcoin bank operating in it's country. Of course, bitcoin makes it easier to run a bank like this, but it also provides a way for anyone to check how much BTC they actually have in reserve.

Of course, this isn't the only way to generate 'money' like that. Admittedly my understanding of this is only basic, but I thought most governments had given up trying to control the money supply anyway? That they couldn't control it because there was always new ways of creating cash substitutes?

For your second question, each bitcoin transaction has a transaction fee associated with it (which can be zero). It is up to each individual miner to decide which transactions to include in the block, and currently they give a higher priority to ones with a higher transaction fee. As to who gets this fee? The miner who solves the block gets all of the transaction fees as well as the new coins. My understanding is that even now, free transactions are on the way out. The current standard fee is 0.01 BTC for reference. The idea is that as time goes on, most of the reward will switch to transactions fees over new coins.

As for bots, it's not true to assume that there is no opportunity cost for mining. As they mine, it becomes more likely that they will be detected. Every 10 minutes or so, you need to start working on the latest block (or else everyone else will ignore your chain). Then there is the increased resource usage (most malware tries to stay under the radar so it doesn't get noticed and removed). They could mine slowly of course, but this makes it easier for the legitimate network to outhash them.

If we look here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison an E7300 can do 7.8 Mhash/s. That's running fult tilt, and it would be very noticable if your PC was doing that 24/7. Let's say that you can run it at 10%, and the computer is on for half the day, so 5% (keep in mind laptops are outselling desktops, so I don't think this is so unreasonable). Now we're down to 400 khash/s. The total current network hashing power is roughly 2 Thash/s now, and increasing rapidly. You'd need 5,000,000 bots to equal that, and even then the reward would only reduce by half. Now CPU mining is very inefficient compared to GPU mining, but high performance GPUs are rare and most of your bots won't have them. It would certainly reduce that figure though. The point I'm trying to make, is that it's not as easy to do as you might think at first.

Its not true that is not measureable. Indeed some of the first (surprisingly accurate) measurements in 1798: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cavendish-lab.jpg
And you are quite right that you weigh differentatly depending on whether you are on a mountain or in a valley, but this different isn't quite insignificant. Thats not to say thats the only way the gravitational field changes though (moving further from the centre of the earth. It's something worth looking up).

Actually, you may be disappointed if you buy SSDs for the boot speed. HDD manufacturers have done a remarkable job optimizing that. And in the case of an OS like Vista, the benefit from an SSD's low latency is dwarfed by the benefit from an HDD's raw read speed. Those 640GB Caviar drives are apparently one of the fastest booting HDDs/SSDs. (unless you go incredibly high end)

SSDs have been proven enormously helpful for games, though; especially games where you can't possibly store all the textures in memory, such as... Crysis.

I think your post is either terribly misinformed, or you are overstating yourself. I have no idea how can say a 320GB platter drive (and there are 500GB ones now too...) could possibly hope to outperform all but 'incredibly high end' drives. Look at the OCZ Vertex, or G.Skill Falcon (or the supertalent drives etc based on the same controller). The smaller sizes are around the price of a velciraptor (admittedly smaller though, but still large enough for vista + some apps), and they blow the velciraptor out of the water. Don't just take my word for it:
http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews.php?/storage/ocz_vertex_120gb_sata2_ssd/7
And that crap about it being enormously helpful? Sure it definitely is desirable, but not even that benchmark you posted is fair for crysis (as they admit in the article...). For the vast majority of the time, SSDs only improve load time (note your floppy RAID array does not count).

The US Army already makes a training simulator like you describe. At first it was a modified version of Operation Flashpoint I believe. Now they have developed their own solution which is based on top of America's Army (the PR FPS). Even their own solution like lots of games uses the unreal engine however (2.0, then 2.5 and 3 for the upcoming version).

Unless they have chaned this in, oh, one year it is actually one hour for the tech free, and two for the tech assisted. While I could have used a CAS calculator (but did not), I don't remember thinking it would have helped that much. An in any case, those very same skills were tested in the other exam. The assisted exam allows you to simply show if you understand, what are fundamentally I believe, the more important concepts.

longacre writes "For all their incessant bickering in the first two presidential debates over conflicts of interest and government regulation, PopMech columnist Glenn Derene is puzzled that the candidates have yet to be challenged on a vital issue directly related to both those topics: Net neutrality. John McCain and Barack Obama have stated elsewhere their opposing views on the issue, with McCain being opposed to Net neutrality and favoring light regulation of the Internet, while Obama is in favor of neutrality and seeks Government involvement. In any case, since there is no standard accepted definition of 'network neutrality,' until the candidates elaborate on their positions (which they both declined to do for this piece, nor anywhere else so far, for that matter), 'both sides can make a credible case that they're the ones defending freedom of innovation and open communication.'"

An anonymous reader writes "The Jace Hall Show launched today on Sony's Crackle with a real gameplay preview of Duke Nukem Forever. Jace Hall is a former video game producer and Warner Bros exec and apparently this is his foray into online celebrity. DNF is 12 years in development ... it might be real after all." And if you have had enough self-indulgent gaming-news patter, another reader says "If you want to simply skip right ahead, it's about 4:20 in."